Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Since Oracle took over Sun, I've been increasingly wary of tying myself too closely to Java. Their decision to shorten the support cycle for versions of Java not under an Oracle support contract was a bit annoying - it virtually forces a migration from Java 6 to Java 7 if you want continued security updates. We run a mixed Linux / Windows environment - so whilst the Linux vendors will continue to support Java 6, our Windows environment needs to be Java 7. So I decided to prepare to upgrade our Linux environment as well to Java 7.

The first surprise was that OpenJDK 7 on Ubuntu requires OpenJDK 6 to be installed as well (!!), and if you later try to uninstall OpenJDK 6 then it'll uninstall OpenJDK 7 as well:

I can hear all the Windows lemmings laughing at us now saying "why do those Linux guys put up with that?". Sometimes I wonder too. Why you can't just "apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk" and expect it to work I will never know.